Saturday, October 29, 2005

A Long Week


Hello Everyone,
Well I wasn't able to update all week due to a problem with my modem. I fixed it this evening so here's the update. For those who have been asking here's some basic info on our store and activities this week. Our sales floor is 19,000 sq feet (Tillsonburg Wal-mart is 52,000 sales floor and Kitchener fairview is about 78,000). We have about 58,000 feet of warehouse. This is due to the fact our store was rebuilt about 5 years ago and they attached the new store to the old store. We use the old store as a warehouse. Most of our hardgoods are flown in to the store twice a week in a old DC3 . Foodstuffs with long expiry dates such as canned goods, paper goods etc. come in via barge in the summer. We order for the barge in January review the orders in Febuary. In July a ship is loaded in Montreal with our order as well as a couple of our other stores. It sails up the St Lawrence around Newfoundland and into the Hudsons Bay. It is then unloaded in shipping containers to a barge that is brought up the river from chesterfield inlet to our store. We then unload the barge with forklifts and place the containers around the store by various entrance near where the product will be stored till needed. We then manually unload all the trailers, the trick to this is you have only 48 hours to unload approx 39,000 lbs of goods. All the male empolyees and whatever locals we can hire line up and we essentially us a fire brigade line-up to pull all the products into the store and sort them to storage locations. During this period we worked 18 hour days and took 47 hours to do it this year. Goods brought in on the Barge (sealift) cost approx .80 cents to reach the store, this is why we bring as much as we can in this way.

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